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Friday, October 1, 2010

Brad Laner

Another really nice piece of work from Home-Tapes, the wandering indie experimental label that used to be in Arkansas, then Athens now somewhere else entirely. It's Brad Laner, who does a kind of soft-focus, but challenging layered experimental pop.

I reviewed it last week in Blurt:

Meticulously plotted daydreams, Brad Laner's songs shamble and wander through flowery psychedelic landscapes, all ease on the surface. Scratch that surface, though, and obsessively pixilated detail emerges, a mesh of intersecting layers and sounds that shifts measure to measure, second to second. The primary colors may be Beatles psychedelia and Beach Boys-ish vocal counterpoint, but you can also find little intervals of shoe-gazing guitars, electronic glitch, sound collage, hip hop beat making and Hall and Oates-esque soul falsetto. On the best songs - "Brain" for instance - Laner spins out swirling mandalas of indistinct revelation, precision subsumed in clouds of intuitive feeling.